Back to School is a comedy film starring Rodney Dangerfield, that grossed over $108 million worldwide on a budget of $11 million.
It was released in 1986 (like Top Gun and Crocodile Dundee), the year I came to the US. The scene “First Economics Class” is priceless:
2017: I presented for the first time in an Economics Department, at Stanford.
2012: I presented for the first time to a medical audience (MGH Grand Rounds), part of Harvard Medical School. Subsequently, I have presented at UPMC, Stanford and UCSF.
2018: I presented for the first time in a Physics department, at UC Berkeley. (The Next Quantum Revolution?).
2015: I presented for the first time in a Public Policy department, at Heinz College here at CMU. Since 2017, I have visited HKS several times.
Way, way back, in 1997, I gave a talk in the Mathematics department at MIT, the same week I gave a talk (on a different topic obviously!) at HBS.
Zeynep, this was your very first OM seminar as a PhD student at HBS, you told me. Sorry to hear!😊
Of course, giving a talk in OR and CS departments, engineering and business schools is not that surprising given the nature of my work. Indeed, at some universities I have given talks in several different departments over the years (many times in the same department like OM and OR), some that I have listed above.
What is different from a typical academic giving research talks to PhD students/faculty is that I have been a guest speaker in MBA/MS classes for my entrepreneurship and industry implementations:
MBA: Darden (SmartOps) in Marketing elective, Harvard (OrganJet + GuardianWings) in OB elective.
MS (in Supply Chain): MIT (Sloan, Engineering), U. Michigan (Ross).
Kris, I think I met you at the guest lecture I gave at MIT (Supply Chain elective, co-taught by Steve Graves and David Simchi-Levi) for the first time as you were the TA?
Some free-associations from top-20 B-schools (including Tepper that I do not list below, looks like I am 16/20, and depending on the year/magazine, 10/10) that I have visited:
Cornell. Joe Thomas. Columbia. Paul Glasserman. NYU. Eitan Zemel. Wharton. Morris Cohen. Kellogg. Jan van Mieghem. UNC. Jay Swaminathan. UCLA. Chris Tang. Booth. Baris Ata. Stanford. Hau Lee. Harvard. Julie Battilana. Darden. Ron Wilcox. MIT. Retsef Levi. Haas. Candi Yano. Ross. Ravi Anupindi. USC. Sampath Rajgopalan.
Of course, there are other B-schools I have visited. Here are five that come to mind:
Purdue. Lee Schwarz. Case. Matt Sobel. Santa Clara. Steve Nahmias. UTD. Suresh Sethi. Olin. Panos Kouvelis.
You know how much I enjoyed my in-person visit to UCL and Cambridge in January 2020 (Lean Monarchy), before the COVID lockdown. How about 2021?
Earlier this year, I gave a zoom talk (on Quantum Integer Programming) at the University of Minnesota. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and it was great to receive this email (thanks KK!):
Dear Sridhar:
Your recent virtual visit and seminar presentation were an absolute joy and an intellectual feast for us all at the Carlson School. Beyond providing us with an introduction to quantum computing and its potential to provide actionable solutions to many of our complex real-world supply chain & operations problems, among others, your presentation and narrative (including references to the colloquial “low funda” and “high funda,” bringing back many fond memories of the undergraduate engineering days) were so rich in content and perspective, and thought provoking!
Many thanks for all the time you spent with us, meeting faculty colleagues and doctoral students. Your visit will have a lasting impact on us all in the days ahead.
Personally, it was good to catch up on the early 1990s when we both were rookie Assistant Professors.
Looking forward to staying in touch and seeing you in person before too long.
What is my next university talk (still on zoom, scheduled for June 4th)?
Dear Professor Sridhar Tayur,
Hope this email finds you well.
I am honored to invite you as a Distinguished Speaker for Koç University College of Engineering Distinguished Seminar Series.
Seminars are usually made up of 45-50 minutes of presentation and 10-15 minutes of discussion.
It will be our great honor to have you as the Distinguished Speaker of our seminar series.
A natural question to ask is where (and when) will my next in-person University visit be? More interesting question:
What new department can I give a talk in?
A stretch goal:
Film School.
Here are five top 20 film schools in Universities that also have top 20 B-schools:
USC (#1). NYU (#2). UCLA (#4). Columbia (#5). Stanford (#12).
Let me call this:
post-quantum filmology.😏
